Lightning, mustang mare that I’m teaching to cooperatively halter. She’s not easy to catch 100% of the time, but it’s not necessarily an ordeal.
She’s historically flung her head around during R+ training, generally from food anxiety (even though we’re just using hay pellets).
She wasn’t understanding how to lower her head and drop it into the noseband without flinging it and the halter, so I used a cone target. This is not revolutionary, it’s a very common practice. However, thinking of it as a constraint might be a little different - using the cone to constrain the movement choices without using restraint. A “constraints-led approach.” (See Rob Gray.)
Seems like a waste of time to teach a horse something they already know well enough to get the job done, right? But what’s really important here, tasks or learning? Both are necessary, but the objective can change based on whether it’s a training situation or a “live” one. Because she’s reasonably catchable, I’m not worried about having to get the whole job done for safety’s sake right now.
By teaching them something they already know, you build learning/reinforcement history and have the opportunity to refine what they know. You can further develop your language/conversation skills so that learning new things is easier because there’s a greater foundation for communication.
This comes in handy now when working on expectations and structure around food, and later when she will know she can be more focused with her movement, and more aware of her body and proprioception when she’s started as a riding horse.
Bottom line: it starts on a small scale first. Small scale skills can be scaled up for larger scale behaviors. It’s almost always time well spent.
